On Monday, September 25th at 7:30pm Warwick's will host Lara Love Hardin as she discusses and signs her new book, The Many Lives of Mama Love: A Memoir of Lying, Stealing, Writing, and Healing, in conversation with Jason Blitman. Lara Love Hardin is a literary agent, author, prison reform advocate, and president of True Literary. Prior to founding True Literary, she was the co-Ceo of Idea Architects. She has an MFA in creative writing and is a four-time New York Times bestselling collaborative writer, including the #1 New York Times bestseller Designing Your Life, and 2018 Oprah Book Club pick, The Sun Does Shine, which she coauthored with Anthony Ray Hinton about his 30 years as an innocent man on Alabama’s death row. In 2019, she won a Christopher Award for her work “affirming the highest values of the human spirit,” nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and short-listed for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Lara is also the co-founder of The Gemma Project, a gender-responsive organization serving incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women with integrity and compassion. Love Hardin lives in La Selva Beach, California, with her husband, Sam. She has four children, two stepchildren, five dogs, three cats, twenty-one chickens, and four ducks.
Only books purchased from Warwick's will be signed. Please call the Warwick's Book Dept. (858) 454-0347 for details.
Lara Love Hardin recounts her slide from soccer mom to opioid addict to jailhouse shot-caller and her unlikely comeback as a highly successful ghostwriter in this harrowing, hilarious, no-holds-barred memoir.
No one expects the police to knock on the million-dollar, two-story home of the perfect cul-de-sac housewife. But soccer mom Lara Love Hardin has been hiding a shady secret: she is funding her heroin addiction by stealing her neighbors' credit cards.
Lara is convicted of thirty-two felonies and becomes inmate S32179. She learns that jail is a class system with a power structure that is somewhere between an adolescent sleepover party and Lord of the Flies. Furniture is made from tampon boxes and Snickers bars are currency. But Lara quickly finds the rules and brings love and healing to her fellow inmates as she climbs the social ladder to become the "shot caller," showing that jailhouse politics aren't that different from the PTA meetings she used to attend.
When she's released, she reinvents herself as a ghostwriter. Now, she's legally co-opting other people's identities and getting to meet Oprah, meditate with The Dalai Lama, and have dinner with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. But the shadow of her past follows her. Shame is a poison worse than heroin—there is no way to detox. Lara must learn how to forgive herself and others, navigate life as a felon on probation, prove to herself that she is more good than bad, and much more.
The Many Lives of Mama Love is a heartbreaking and tender journey from shame to redemption, despite a system that makes it almost impossible for us to move beyond the worst thing we have ever done.
Jason Blitman is a director and producer based in Southern California, where he recently directed Xanadu for San Diego Musical Theatre and multiple projects for SD Junior Theatre. Jason cast the original Off-Broadway productions of The Lightning Thief: The Percy Jackson Musical, Pete the Cat, and Junie B’s Essential Survival Guide to School and has worked at The Public Theater, The Old Globe, New York Philharmonic, TheaterWorksUSA, and more. Jason is an arts and culture producer for JCC Manhattan, where he produces and hosts their podcast 76West and annual Books That Changed My Life Festival. Additionally, he produces and co-hosts the new podcast Gays Reading. Recent conversations include: Gabrielle Zevin, Jenny Jackson, Emily St. John Mandel, Steven Rowley, R. Eric Thomas, and Angie Kim. Find out more at gaysreading.com and jasonblitman.com.
